Post by: wednesday on July 04, 2014, 01:17:13 am
what is the strategy behind this deck. the main offensive idea lies in destroying the enemy's creatures with the massive amounts of creature destruction cards the deck contains and simultaneously acquire a skeleton army from the boneyard cards. then you can choose between two ways or even mix them up. play shard of patience in order to augment the attacking power of the skeleton army or use skill "improve" of the fallen druid card onto the skeletons. both ways will create o formidable attacking front line.
as an auxiliary attacking resource there is the possibility of creating a nymph army with your lone water nymph.
but these are not the core ideas behind this deck since it is mainly a defensive one. so the main strategy is to freeze the flow of the game until you are ready to fight.for this reason, cc cards( 4 lightning storms, 2 fire storms, 2 pandemonium, 2 improved plague) can be used just to destroy enemy creatures and help you survive. in the same direction lie the 6 sundials which prevent any attack from creatures.besides that they speed up your drawing , a so much needed property of a 60- card deck which give them the status of a perfect fitting card for this deck. for the same reasons there exist 5 electrum hourglasses and the choice of mark time.
why 5 supernova instead of 5 quantum towers. supernova produces 24 mana in one round whereas a quantum tower produces the same amount in 7 rounds. after 7 rounds one would prefer to have towers, but this deck has no mana issues late game so this choice was made according to the thought of augmenting the weak early game of the deck. of course this is a debetable choice since there is no stable entropy quanta source and there is a possibility that a supernova cannot be played whereas the tower automatically brings itself into the game.
improved miracle is a game changing card and could not be omitted from this deck.in many cases it would buy you time to complete your defence.
emphatic bond synergizes well with the rest of the decks gameplay as in mid- late game scenarios your are likely to have many creatures on board and a 20+ plus heal per round from one card is most welcome.
the deck has two shields which are very important for the deck's well being.almost in every case you would prefer permafrost shield over dusk mantle, but still there are some where only mantle has the possibility of saving your hp. besides that it is cheaper and thus can be played earlier.
there is also a third shield which is not something special. mirror shield decreases every attack by one point but even this shield can find itself useful especially in the early game as it is very cheap, or when you want to have a shield that cannot be stolen. there is also a potential of countering a mono aether shard based deck.
sanctuary. provides a useful 4 healing per round but most importantly it protects your mana poll and is directed against one card namely black hole.do not forget that furthermore it protects your hand so nightmare is useless.in general it is a quite useful card to have.
as an "intermezzo" note. you might consider " one card in 60, how many are the odds of drawing this or that necessary card..." but the truth is that this a fast drawing deck or at least this is what it was meant to be. with 2 hourglasses on board and the possibility of sundials you will come to agree that the odds of 1 in 60 are not so small after all...
lastly,improve steal and the pulverizer give some permanent control. one of the many reasons behind this decision is that sundials only stop creatures not weapons.
well this is all and not all in the same time. i cannot cover every aspect of the play of the deck in just a few paragraphs. you will have to try it for yourself if you think it is worth a try. certainly, the wins are more enjoyable than most decks so.. have fun!
Post by: MasN on July 04, 2014, 06:01:51 pm
I tried that in trainer. Bone wall good.
Other options.
Air nymph + quint = stallbreaker
FFQ is good. Might try Oty.
Great deck, nice rainbow control.
6 hgs needed since you want to draw one.
Fun fact: Voodoo+SoP>weapon.
Post by: Higurashi on July 04, 2014, 06:23:04 pm
SoP is superior to both Druid and Queen, and so when you have SoP, you don't need either of those, as MasN has demonstrated. He also chose to pack 2 SoP's, which is a good idea to make drawing one earlier twice as likely (which is very important in a 60-card deck compared to a 30-card deck). The Snovas are a tiny bit risky with Time mark as you'll have some draws with no QT's and a few Snovas, but at 16 QT's you'll be fine most of the time and Snovas are easily the best card for stabilizing your quanta after all.
Besides that, you have plenty of CC but you're lacking a bit in healing. MasN chose to pack another Miracle over the Bond. Personally I'd try to find a way to fit in 2 Bonds and 2 Miracles. I'd probably remove 2 Lightning Storms since you have much more powerful mass-CC. The Octopi work well with SoP, but not with Bone Wall or Boneyard, and you're missing something very important: Elite Oty. Get at least 2, as they work insanely well with both SoP, BW and Boneyard. Nightmares add very little, which gives you 2 card spaces to spend on either those 2 Lightning Storms you took out or some other CC/healing/shields (would only recommend either more BW's or Phasies for that). 2 Steals are perfect for complementing Pulvies, but another option is 2 PA's. One for an HG and one for a Pulvy (or Phasie if needed in a dire situation). One last option is 2 Quints for your Otys or a Druid/Queen if you choose to keep one for the fun factor it adds.
Post by: MasN on July 04, 2014, 06:27:31 pm
Havent tried oty just yet, but it seems needed
I found that bonds werent doing help since trainer decks dont tend to pack face damage. Miricle seems enough if you dont want EMs
I find nightmares a useful way of 10 hp+ draw block but you are correct that its not neded.
Youve mentioned steals PAs and quints, which are all i can think of barring nymphs. (I prolly missed a bit)
Edit: just want to mention that phasies where what i replaced bond with. +rep to both of you for this discussion and quality decks and anysis.
Post by: Submachine on July 05, 2014, 05:09:30 am
Post by: dragonsdemesne on July 05, 2014, 10:54:47 pm
I've never really been a big fan of plagues in a deck like this, but they are capable of (eventually) killing things that your other CC cards can't, so they do make some sense. With the boneyards also taking death quanta, I might drop those in favour of other CC, though. You aren't using any aether quanta, so I would add a few lightning/thunderbolts in place of the improved plagues. I'd probably also try to find a way to add a second pulverizer to increase the draw odds for it. The version of the deck that MasN has is pretty good and still keeps the general theme that you're going for. I think I'd drop the nightmares in his version, and probably drop the octopuses as well; they're just going to act as giant CC magnets for the CC your opponent will have but cannot use, other than on your skeletons. I'm not really a fan of using phase shield and bone wall in the same deck like that, either, but it certainly can work. I'd try to fit in some lightning or maybe a couple more towers instead of those 4 cards. Sancs would do well, too, but the light quanta requirement is already pretty high; another choice could be purifies or bonds or SoG, though I'd worry that bonds would be too slow to matter much here.
Post by: wednesday on July 06, 2014, 02:08:45 am
few things i noticed. it sounds irrational but 1 purify is enough to win most of the poison rushes or poison/light decks. the picture is something like this. you either draw a purify at some time or a miracle that gives you time to draw a purify
the mirror shield has guaranteed some easy wins which no other card could. there happened to be some decks that would try to stall until they kill you with mass amounts of spell damage like saying for example 5 fire lances. of course i never got the chance to see them, but i figured out what was happening since he drew no creatures on board and was just stacking fire quanta. furthermore it can save you from unstable gas which i did not know it counts as spell damage but the AI never triggered it when i had mirror shield on, and also i won a game vs a mono dark where i had been left with 1 hp maximum(from void shards) and the opponent could not finish me off with drain life because of the shield.
what is more, this deck's probably biggest counter( a mono aether )since the whole strategy is aimed towards creature cc, can be actually won IF the opponent plays shards of wisdom which is often the case in these decks.
in overall i found the utility of mirror shield so huge that i would consider to bring another one in so at to ensure the draw, but maybe this is an exaggeration.
as a side question regarding the game mechanics. catapult damage is not reflected by mirror shield. so what damage does the catapult do? obviously not physical, but neither spell damage. so then...what? in my opinion it should be considered as spell damage as catapult is a spell-like ability.
as a side note to a side note: weapon of gravity is obviously broken. i understand that the maker would want to create some synergy between the gravity cards like acceleration and catapult, but 50 hp is just too much when the second highest hp creature has only 15 and the second's weapon has 12 i think. this somewhat ruins the harmony of the cards, a very important aspect of a card game.
all of you are most probably right to omit fallen druid as i did not felt his presence needed most of the time and can be considered just as a luxury though there had been some cases where i improved a creature of my own and gained a game-winning ability with something like 1 quanta cost or used skill improve on an unkillable opponent's spectre wraith of a magnitude of something like 23/24 and then produced a creature i could kill instantly.
noone mentions the water nymph and this is not a surprise since it has little to do with the deck's overall strategy but the truth is that it offers flexibility. there can be cases where the opponent has no creatures or immortal ones. then how are you going to win? the water nymph provides a remarkable solution. just build a nymph army. whether this flexibility is worth the card space in deck is another matter. for the time being i think it is worth.
i have not tried the version of masn yet but i certainly will since he had the courtesy to post it. i am not sure about the nightmares, and i have to agree with dragonsdemesne that octopuses will most probably just melt as soon as they enter the battle field.one thing i can say though , mostly of experience is that 2 miracles is probably an exaggeration. i have never needed to play two miracles and even if you have not draw one when you can play it it means that you have 12 light quanta. that means that you most proably have 2 Hg down and 12 mana from any other quanta source. that also means that you will most probably have ways to deal with the opponent's damage sources.
elite oty will be considered as an addition as it fits very well with the decks theme and as it is now there is a breathing room for gravity quanta. bone walls and aether shields are also an interesting option. i would prefer bone walls over phase shields but i was worried of the death quanta management since you are forced to have boneyards in this deck.
an addition of an extra artifact protect or a quint makes sense but i will not consider it for the time being.
closing, i have to say that i agree with almost everything that dragonsdemesne wrote and i like the depth of his remarks concerning the quanta management. i think that when the time comes to try this deck again i will change the 2 improved plagues for one of the following( 2 lightning bolts/ 1 oty and lightning bolt/ 1 oty 1 phase shield). or maybe just some pillars since the early draw has some inconsistency.
thank you all again
Post by: dragonsdemesne on July 06, 2014, 02:16:13 am
Post by: wednesday on July 06, 2014, 02:23:01 am
Post by: Submachine on July 06, 2014, 03:03:45 am
You aren't using any aether quanta, so I would add a few lightning/thunderbolts in place of the improved plagues. I'm not really a fan of using phase shield and bone wall in the same deck like that, either, but it certainly can work. I'd try to fit in some lightning or maybe a couple more towers instead of those 4 cards.For :aether quanta, I usually use Mindgates. Since you already have CC, the mindgates allow you to actually draw damage from the opponent's deck, having a second option of winning by damage. I once won this way against an evergrowing Pharaoh deck, which are known to be counters to 60-card stalls.
Post by: dragonsdemesne on July 06, 2014, 03:05:18 am
Post by: CuCN on July 06, 2014, 06:34:06 am
Post by: Higurashi on July 06, 2014, 11:04:20 am
I did mention the Queen (it's not called Water Nymph) as a "fun" card, and that's basically what it is. That's not saying it can't be strong, just that it's unpredictable. If you're using this deck vs. Plat, the advice changes, and this is why it's very important to state the goal of the deck. Purify and Mirror Shield become very useful there, that's for sure.
Flying Titans require a lot of investment to get the most out of, and their strongest weapon being the Catapult, you can exploit that weakness to PC. While the 50 HP (which used to be 70 HP) makes it mostly impervious to killing CC, you can Antimatter (and Liquid Shadow), Freeze, Basilisk Blood, Reverse Time, Lobotomize (to remove Momentum) and Freeze+Shockwave (for instant kill) it. Flying weapons all have a huge weakness to the Eternity weapon since you can only pack 6 Animate Weapon (12 in Arena). While Catatitans is a strong PvP deck, it naturally gets a lot stronger in Arena with Dexterity, but it's not one of the dominant decks. It IS, however, one of the few decks a Timebow might have problems with if it's not packing Antimatter or manages to destroy the Catapults or Titans while they're in the weapon slot.
Happy to help.
Post by: wednesday on July 06, 2014, 11:48:40 am
Post by: wednesday on July 07, 2014, 07:02:29 pm
apparently there is a "trainer mode" which i was not aware of until masn mentioned it in his post. i thought it could be worth giving it a try.
after some wandering, i came across an opponent with a name "nothing but..." and 900 hp. after destroying 20 eternities and being really patient with the shard of patience this is what happened.
https://imageshack.com/i/ncipjp (https://imageshack.com/i/ncipjp)